The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945

I agree with what most reviewers on the 2 star category say. All but about 20 pages are in excess. As to the rest, there are very many better books on the history of the last year of the war.Read, for example, Max Hasting's Armaggedon.

Absolutely not innovative, imaginative or inventive.

Don't waste your money, and above all, your time.

In the book The End, WWII historian and eminence grise Ian Kershaw posits the question, why did the Germans of the Third Reich keep fighting when it was abundantly clear they were losing the war? The answer is in 592 pages of historial narrative (its neatly summed up on the last page, so don't sneak a peek if you don't want a spoiler)

Ian Kershaw is of course a monumental figure of WWII scholarship, famous for his Hitler biographies [[ASIN:0393320359 Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris]] and [[ASIN:0393322521 Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis]]. In this book one gets the sense that, like a jazz master, he's just riffing on some old melodies that he wants to explore.

Perhaps reviewers complain that its not up to par with his other works; regardless, it's a high-quality product from a historian at the top of his game. He knows his material cold, he's in command of a compelling and powerful narrative style, and his insights are sound.

Is is essential Kershaw, a desert-island historical work? Probably not. But its very, very good, and it makes good reading.

THE STORY HE TELLS WAS 100 PAGES TO LONG, KERSHAW, REPEATS HIMSELF OVER AND OVER AGAIN,AND AT TIMES GIVES TWO VERSIONS FOR THE SAME QUESTIONS.
I THINK HE MISSED THE BALL ON THIS BOOK, HE DID NOT STICK TO THE THE REAL QUESTION AS WHY THE FIGHTING WENT ON AND ON, JUST GAVE A LOT OF DIFFERENT ANSWERS TO THE SAME QUESTION, AS I STATED ABOVE

Kershaw's book explores a neglected issue that ultimately tells us a lot about why the Third Reich was so successful in consolidating and wielding power: why did the military, state, and citizenry continue to follow the regime after it was obvious that the struggle was completely hopeless?

The answer is twofold. First, terror was insitutionalized and certain: even the most tepid dissent or defeatism would be rooted out and punished severely. Second, and most disturbing, the vast majority of the army and citizenry either avidly supported the regime or were somehow complicit with it. This complicity included knowledge of the regime's war crimes, slave labor, and disposition of the Jews. The regime and Hitler were wildly popular until 1941 -- and the people looked away from its obvious failings and criminality. The people knew they had made their bargain with the devil and were now reaping the whirlwind -- there was a sense of having no choice but to fight on.

Kershaw is blistering in his criticism of the professional military. Stauffenberg's assassination attempt was tepid and enlisted the support of only a few -- the vast majority were persuaded by their oath as military men (and perhaps by their complicity with Hitler's war crimes) not to turn on the head of state. And once the assassination failed, the checks on the military and the need to prove devotion ended any effort at dissent, much less a coup.

Kershaw is also effective in demonstrating the absolute moral bankruptcy of the Nazi party. The party bosses were "little Hitlers" in their domain and strutted their power arbitrarily. They justified this on their macho "superman" status as the fittest elements of the fittest race. But when the going got tough, they did nothing to look after their citizens or organize an evacuation. They ran for their lives and let the people fend for themselves. The hatred and contempt for the party by the end of war was palpable -- but the terror wielded by the regime and the people's complicity with Hitler still kept them in check.

Kershaw is critical of the German willingness to embrace "victim" status in the 1944-45 period. True, their citizens were slaughtered by the Anglo-American air war and were raped and killed on a massive scale by the Red Army (and to a lesser extent by the French, surprisingly enough). True, the evil regime after feeding on and crushing Jews, East Europe, and the Russians, turned its evil on its own people. By the end of the war, the average German was just another victim under the regime's jackboot. But, Kershaw asks, wasn't this last "victim" responsible for creating the monster in the first place? Can they truly embrace victim status if they were complicit in the regime's previous criminality?

This is a compelling and disturbing book.

"Accurate scholarship can/Unearth the whole offence/ From Luther until now/That has driven a culture mad,/ Find what occured at Linz,/ What huge imago made/ A psychopathic god." - W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

That unearthing, in a nutshell, is what Ian Kershaw's well-documented piece of scholarship does for the final year of Nazi Germany. Why did Nazi Germany, faced with certain defeat and overwhelming odds, continue its fight on to a suicidal end, taking with it hundreds of thousands of German civilians and soldiers, as well as already-persecuted concentration camp inmates and enslaved foreign workers? Kershaw pursues his answer through relentless examination of primary sources from archival material, probing the actions and writings of the top Nazi quadumvirate of Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, and Bormann... as well as the next echelon of Nazi leadership, the Gauleiter in charge of individual regions in the Third Reich.

This is compelling writing. As a reader knowing the general ending of Hitler's brutal regime, I found myself nervously anticipating the page number at which the madness would finally cease. But Kershaw makes you wait. Wait through his examination of countless examples of the slaughter of German citizens at the hands of "flying court- martials" (hastily constructed mobile execution units that scoured the German countryside digging up the slightest evidence of resistance to the regime's final madness); past his recounting of the brutally conducted evacuations in which cowardly Gauleiter put their own safety above that of civilians for whom they were responsible; past his detailing of such demented plans as those of Himmler, who proposed that German families use every means of transport--including baby carriages--to move military supplies to the rapidly decaying battle fronts of the Wehrmacht.

It is hard to create suspense in non-fiction writing, especially that which is written about well-known historical events, yet Kershaw does so throughout this book. Often quoting verbatim from German documents, he does all that a historian can do to honor his chosen subject. Kershaw's analysis of facts and his answering of his big question "Why?" is through and convincing, and multi-layered. His final chapter, "Anatomy of Self-Destruction" posits the "extreme rarity of a country being able and prepared to fight on in war to the point of total destruction." His resounding account of WHY Germany did so then follows and points to many causes: the fatal charisma of Hitler, himself the "psychopathic god"; to the military's legacy of not repeating another "1918" for Germany; to the fragmentation and bitter rivalries among his top quadumvirate, which prevented any kind of unified opposition to Hitler himself; to Germans' manic fear of Bolshevism and the Asiatic threat from the East.

This book does its job. But one reservation remains. Kershaw has done a thorough job of answering his key question, as to why such self-destruction continued for an already largely defeated country. Yet what about the corollary to that? What about countries that DID decide to resign themselves to a sensible cessation of hopeless warfare? As a historian, Kershaw would have done himself well to provide examples of where that more rational course of action prevailed. Perhaps in his introduction or in his conclusion, the reader could have been provided with historical examples of defeated nations doing that more sensible thing. If he calls Germany's pursuit of total destruction a "rarity" in history (p.386), then what were the mechanisms and where were those times when defeated nations did decide to stop. At four hundred pages of narrative text, Kershaw's book still had some room to consider that corollary.

My fifth star would go to another book or another written account that would satisfy that curiosity.

Nevertheless, this is a model of superior history writing, and the 132 pages of supporting materials at the book's end still await my eager perusal. Its astonishing variety and scrupulous completeness look like a book in itself.

Because I enjoy the scholarly approach of Ian Kershaw and because both Antony Beevor and Andrew Roberts recommended "The End", I spent more than the cover price to buy the paperback four years after the title hit the bookshops. And although I enjoyed the quick read along with well-documented notes and excellent black and white photos, I believe Kershaw (or his editing team of Simon Winder and Laura Stickney) merely rewarmed much of what Ian has written before to fill an inch-thick paperback. On top of that, some of the content appears to repeat itself throughout the book and that's not what I expect in Kershaw's work.

By the time I finished five pages of the preface, four pages of Dramatis Personae and 14 pages of the Introduction, I had the gist of Kershaw's thesis. I read those pages while in the bookshop, thumbed back and forth to the Notes, then 15 pages of the Conclusion. I bought the book, thinking the 369 pages in the middle would offer some narrative explanation about why the German nation appeared to blindly follow madman Hitler to the near destruction of the nation.

The book comes up short in this regard.

The middle page of "The End" do explain why Germany kept fighting to the death. Moreover, Kershaw explains the psyche of the average German citizen in the mid-1940s. Those survivors met my father while he served in occupied Germany and Kershaw's account tracks with stories my father would tell us years later. The big difference is that my father told the story of the German people by sharing the perspectives of various people he knew. We learned what Germans were thinking by hearing how a wood carver, a soldier, a nurse, a priest and a war widow behaved as good citizens of the Reich. These little vignettes gave me colourful anecdotes that complemented my study of military history while in the Air Force Academy. I wish Ian Kershaw might have followed the same narrative format, perhaps telling Germany's demise through the commentary, actions or diary notes of Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer.

I'm following Ian Kershaw on Amazon, hoping to see that he plans such a narrative work as a future publication.

[[ASIN:0143122134 The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945]]

Kershaw does a magisterial job of describing the appalling physical destruction and human suffering that occurred in the first half of 1945, on both the eastern and western 'fronts.' Also excellent is his analysis of the factors that impelled the Germans to continue the war, until their country was utterly destroyed, even though it was clear, after Normandy, that Germany could not win the war. The primary factor- no surprise- was the pathological personality of Adolf Hitler.
The book is deficient in two respects. First, Kershaw does not attempt to analyze *why* the Germans lost the war. Germany, and allied countries, still had two million men in uniform in early 1945, yet the Allied forces (USA, Britain, Soviet Union) rather quickly marched through Germany. Why? Kershaw does suggest logistics-- Allied bombing had destroyed, by early 1945, most of the German capability to manufacture and transport armament, fuel, rail cars, etc. For an excellent analysis of this 'why' question, see the final chapter of Andrew Roberts' 'The Storm of War.'
Second, he specifically identifies geographical sites-- towns, cities, states, regions, 'gau,' etc.-- in the context of troop or refugee movements, or (say) bombing targets. However, more often than not, the maps in the book (nine in all) do not show these sites. This leads to some confusion for the attentive reader.

I read Kershaw's two-volume biography of Hitler in 2001 and his Fateful Choices on 23 Oct 2007. So I was eager to read this book. It is largely based on German material and records, and sets out in rather turgid detail all that went on in Germany from July 20, 1944 till into May 1945. Military events are set out only to show what the Nazis were reacting to during that time. The dominance of Hitler was pretty total as far as running things in Germany was concerned. This does not make for pleasant reading--only when we get to the very end of the book is the account lifted to exciting and rewarding reading. The total depravity of the Nazis before that time is painful to read about. But finally, as we come to the final chapters of the book the gloom lifts and the book becomes a good reading experience. The book spends little time on the course of what happened after the surrender in May 1945. One thinks of all those brainwashed Germans and wonders if before they died how many came to regret their adherence to the evil that was Hitler and his ideology.

I had mixed feelings about "The End." First, the positive: The book was excellently researched and cited. The book was well written and indeed very readable. The photos of Nazi and military leaders and destroyed German cities enriched the text. Kershaw identified several factors that contributed to the "Defiance and Destruction Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945": (!) support of Hitler was falling, and the NSDAP was widely hated, but there was no alternative to carrying on; (2) terror played a big role in suppressing revolt; (3) most soldiers fought on, even with enthusiasm; (4) as things deteriorated, people took out their frustrations on scapegoats; (5) the Nazis got greatly extended power over society; and (6) the savagery of the war in the East (e.g, the horrors created by the Red Army in the East Prussian town of Nemmersdorf [that soon became known all over Germany after the German Army had briefly retaken the town]. Of course, most of this has been said before, but Kershaw adds a lot more precision in detail, and indeed a sense of drama--readers can picture themselves right there.

Now, the negative: Toward the end of the book, I got the impression that the author was becoming too trendy and was beating a lot of dead horses. Throughout the book there were way too many value judgments and ad hominems--for example, "brutal" and "most fanatical" (p. 103); "lapdog loyalty" (p. 205); "monstrous ego" (p. 293); "cowering" (p. 320); "desperado actions" (p. 392); and "utterly warped" (p. 395). History should be purely objective--readers are capable of making their own value judgments.

As a unifying and integrating theme, HOPE in spite of adversity, played a major role in the developing of the fsctors discussed above. And indeed the emergence of hope receives considerable justification in German history. Consider: (1) the search for identity as Germans stemming from the time of Martin Luther [see my review of "Here I Stand"] and the Reformation; (2) the havoc of the Thirty Years War (1630-1648), fought mainly on German soil; (3) the rise of Prussia as a major European power and unification of states as the German Empire; (4) the defeat of Germany in WW1, attributed to treachery and a "stab in the back;" (5) the folly of the Treaty of Versailles; (6) the 1924 Inflation; and (7)the Great Depression, out of which Hitler pulled Germany through militarization and the construction of Autobahnen and other projects. Note that items 4 through 7 were within the memories of millions of Germans. It is scarcely surprising that Adolf Hitler emerged as Savior and Hero, and that the his many well-known successes led to the image of the charismatic Fuehrer ("charismatic" is often used by Kershaw).

Finally, one might argue that the Wirtschaftstwunder and the unification of West and East Germany marks a final justification of HOPE. However, I don't think so, and now Germany is not alone. The USA and the rest of the world are now caught up in the decay that marks the ecological insult to Mother Earth!

Concise , complete and powerful analysis on why Germany fought to the end of exhaustion